One of the biggest issues with today's smart phones and other types of portable wireless communication devices is battery consumption. This problem becomes exacerbated as applications running on a wireless device regularly cause the device to engage in background wireless communications, such as automatic communications to synchronize e-mail, calendar, weather, gaming, and other data with network servers for instance. Each time a device engages in such communication, the device may need to wake up from an idle state, work with a serving radio access network to acquire a radio link through which to exchange bearer traffic, transmit and receive data over that link, and then tear down the link, all of which consumes limited battery power. Particularly as multiple applications do this, a device can readily lose battery power, thereby inconveniencing the device user.